This is precisely the issue that I have with this paragraph in your opening post: Quite apart from the merits of the theory that you sketch further on...
Cheers. Good stuff. I didn't realize there was a song to go with the instrumentals. That guitar dude's arrangement of the accompaniment is impressive ...
Speaking of Baroque... Many years ago I heard this tune in a garish synth arrangement, in some indie sci-fi flick: https://youtu.be/T5UxwohjhHw I had ...
I am not a connoisseur or anything (I don't even know who Steely Dan is), but wow! You can recognize Glass right from the first measure from his trade...
What predictions are you talking about? Climatologists don't make predictions for individual years. Eight of the past ten years were the warmest on re...
While I share everyone's concern and have a feeling that things are indeed worse than expected, that Aljazeera headline is misleading if that's all yo...
Any probability has to obey additivity and normalization axioms, otherwise it's not a probability. If you find that your subjective probabilities add ...
If the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many @"RogueAI" brains and infinitely many non-@"RogueAI" brains. So for any given brain, there...
The clip doesn't say that last bit. That said, it is more confusing than anything else. I only got what it was hinting and gesturing at because I've a...
What are your criteria for understanding in this case? You have experienced living for N number of years. Can you understand the duration of N+1 years...
I would be interested in reading it - it sounds like an interesting take. I lean towards compatibilism, but I am sympathetic to some libertarian persp...
:up: The only thing I disagree with is this opposition of "selfish" vs. "ethical." If you do as you say above - choose responsibly - that means you do...
If that is how the theory is structured, yes. But that's a feature, not a bug. You could alternatively explain initial conditions in terms of later fe...
Historically, the so-called Big Bang theory came first, and theor(ies) of inflation were developed later, around 1980s. Inflation pushes the Big Bang ...
I am surprised that they haven't addressed the fake links issue. ChatGPT-based AIs are not minimalistic like AlphaChess, for example, where developers...
The Big Bang theory grew out of General Relativity, which allowed it as one of its general solutions, and astronomical observations that made it incre...
Kremlin rhetoric regarding NATO expansion has been all over the place. To start with, NATO expansion was presented to the West as the main excuse for ...
As an aside, if you mean the retarded/advanced wave asymmetry, @"Kenosha Kid" had a thread here about Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum...
The same way we vet all other theories? All theories have some brute facts, some givens in them: equations, constants, boundary conditions. There is n...
Is there a difference in your mind between choosing and deciding? Are you associating choice with something arbitrary or capricious? That's not how we...
The beginning of time had to be an entropy minimum, since entropy can only increase. That's the least surprising thing here - we've known this since t...
I think the important point made there is about the relation between entropy and the direction of time ("the arrow of time"). Time on the global scale...
Yes, entropy reaches its maximum at equilibrium. But the universe was never actually at equilibrium, because it was and still is quickly expanding. ("...
I read the Penrose paper up to that oft-quoted 10^10^123 number and the discussion of gravitational degrees of freedom; I don't know enough to underst...
The initial state was unstable due to the structure of spacetime - that's how the theory goes. The universe was set to expand from the get-go. It is (...
I am wary of elaborate analogies given in lieu of an argument. Give me the argument straight, then illustrate it with an analogy if you like, and I'll...
Russia has been an empire since before there was The Russian Empire, and through all its name changes. It continued expanding its domain through 1940s...
Here is a rough analogy from school thermodynamics. Consider an insulated vessel filled with gas at a thermal equilibrium. This system will remain sta...
I am not disagreeing with the low(er) entropy part. The space that is currently occupied by the observable universe was at a much lower entropy 14 bil...
By that time Germany had already reduced its dependence on Russian gas from ~50% to ~9% and was on course to eliminate it entirely. And it wasn't gett...
I am not sure that the principle of indifference can lend us any insight here. When tossing a coin, we assume that the coin has equal chances of landi...
I am surprised that you went for this explanation, given what you said above about frequentist explanations. This is a textbook case where statistics ...
I read something else, less comprehensive. And one can find more with a quick google. For my part, I wasn't all that interested in fact-checking Hersh...
As opposed to what? A world at thermodynamic equilibrium? And what do you mean by explanation here? We are bound to find ourselves in one world or ano...
Well, at least China doesn't. This is #1 in their recent position statement: China never officially acknowledged Russian territorial acquisitions, inc...
Sy Hersh no longer confines his lies to talks. His latest "blockbuster" has been fact-checked using OSINT and found to be lacking in some crucial deta...
The first question to ask is: what do you what from your definition? Do you want it to reflect current use in ordinary language? That is what dictiona...
And Russia is the only player (that I know of) that has actually done this before. Possibly more than once. But those Georgia incidents made a lot mor...
Yeah, all of a sudden there's a flood of murky intelligence leaks in media. What's up with that? New York Times: Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian G...
Listening to some jazz for a change: J.D. Allen https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHNJvwXuaSzTliSAmna2TA Sonny Rollins said about him: "He’s got a nic...
No, he does not. Nowhere does Gert claim that the imperative of lessening of harm is (a) descriptively moral and (b) scientifically justified. Also, I...
This formulation departs from the meta-ethical question of "what morality is". Stating that the goal of moral precepts is "lessening of harm" tells us...
When the OP first started posting on this forum a while ago, I was driven by curiosity to quick-read some sort of paper or book chapter that he shared...
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